On Vital Reserves: The Energies of Men. The Gospel of Relaxation

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ON VITA^^L
RESERVES

THE ENERGIES OF
MEN. -.THE GOSPEL
OF RELAXATION

WILLIAM JAMES

NE» YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

I

BY WILLIAM JAMES

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Copyriglit, 1011, by Henry James, Jr.
Copyright, 1800, 1000, by William James

HARVARD V
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THE ENERGIES OF MEN

THE ENERGIES OF MEN»

EVERYONE knows what it is to start
a piece of work» either intellectual or
muscular, feeling stale — or oMt as
an Adirondack guide once put it to me.
And everybody knows what it is to "warm
up'' to his job. The process of warming up
gets particularly striking in the phenome-
non known as "second wind/' I On usual
occasions we make a practice of stopping an
occupation as soon as we meet the first
effective layer (so to call it) of fatigue. It
We have then walked, played, or worked
"enough,'' so we desist. ^That amount of |

^ This was the title origiiially given to the Presidential Ad-
dress delivered before the American Philosophical Association
at Columbia University. December 28, 1906, and published as
there delivered b the PA/loMpA/co/ Rtolaa for January, 1907.
The address was later published, after slight alteration, in the
Amerkan Maiaxim for October, 1907. under the title "The
Powers of Men.*' The more popular form is here reprinted
under the title which the author himself preferred. From
" Memories and Studies," Longmans, Green & Co., 191 1.

3

4 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

, fetigue is an efficacious obstruction on this
side of which our usual life is cast But if
,an unusual necessity forces us to press on'-
ward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue
gets worse up to a certain critical point*
when gradually or suddenly it passes away,
I'and we are fresher than before. We have
I evidently tapped a level of new energy
I masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle
usually obeyed. There may be layer after
layer of this experience. A third and a
fourth "wind'* may supervene. \ Mental
activity shows the phenomenon as well as
physical, and in exceptional cases we may
find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-
distress, amounts of ease and power that we
never dreamed ourselves to own, — sources
of strength habitually not taxed at all, be*
cause habitually we never push through the
obstruction, never pass those early critical
points.

For many years I have mused on the

phenomenon of second wind, trying to find

\ a physiological theory, jit is evident that

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 5

our organism has store^I-'Up reserves of
energy that are ordinarily not called upon,
but that may be called upon: deeper and
deeper strata of combustible or explosible
material, discontinuously arranged, but ready
for use by anyone who probes so deep, and
repairing themselves by rest as well as do
the superficial strata. Most of us OHitinue
living unnecessarily near our surface. / Our
energy-budget is like our nutritive budget.
Physiologists say that a man is in ^'nutritive
veguilibrium" when day after day he neither
gainslior loses weight But the odd thing is
that this condition may obtain on astonish-
ingly different amounts of food. Take a
man in nutritive equilibrium, and syste-
matically increase or lessen his rations. In
the first case he will begm to gain weight, in
the second case to lose it. The change will
be greatest on the first day, less on the
second, less still on the third; and so on
till he has gained all that he will gain, or
lost all that he will lose, on that altered diet.
He is now in nutritive equilibrium again.

6 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

but with a new weight; and this neither
lessens nor increases because his various
combustion-processes have adjusted them^
selves to the changed dietary. He gets rid»
in one way or another* of just as much N,
C, H, etc., as he takes in pet diem.

Just so one can be in what I might call
*' efficiency-equilibrium" (neither gaining nor
losing power when once the equilibrium is
reached) on astonishingly different quanti-
ties of work, no matter in what direction the
work may be measured. It may be physical
work, intellectual work, moral work, or
spiritual work.
{ Of course there are limits: the trees don't
^ grow into the sky. But the pisin fact
\ remains that men the world over possess
amounts of resource which only very excep-
tional individuals push to their extremes of
use. But the very same individual, pushing
his energies to their extreme, may in a vast
number of cases keep the pace up day after
day, and find no ''reaction" of a bad sort*
so long as decent hygienic conditions are

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 7

Ipreserved. His more active rate of energize
ling does not wreck him; for the organism
/adapts itself, and as the rate of waste aug-
ments, augments correspondingly the rate
of repair.

I say the rate and not the time of repair.
The busiest man needs no more hours of
rest than the idler. Some years ago Pro-
fessor Patrick, of the Iowa State University,
kept three young men awake for four days
and nights. When his observations on them
were finished, the subjects were permitted
to sleep themselves out. All awoke from
this sleep completely refreshed, but the one
who took longest to restore himself from his
long vigil only slept one-third more time
than was regular with him.

If my reader will put together these two
concq;>tions, first, that few men live at their
maximum of energy, and second, that any-
one may be in vital equilibrium at very
different rates of energizing, he wUl find, I
think, that a very pretty practical problem
of national economy, as well as of individual

8 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

< ethics, opens upon his view. In rough termst
' we may say that a man who energizes below
his normal maximum (ails by just so much
J to profit by his chance at life;) and that a
nation filled with such men is inferior to a
nation run at higher pressure. tThe problem
is, then, how can men be trained up to their
most useful pitch of energy? \And how can
nations make such training most accessible
to all their sons and daughters. This, after
all, is only the general problem of education,
formulated in slightly different terms.

''Rough" terms, I said just now, because
the words "energy" and "maximum" may
easily suggest only quantity to the reader's
mind, whereas in measuring the human
energies of which I speak, qualities as well
as quantities have to be taken into account.
Everyone feels that his total power rises
when he passes to a higher qualitative level
of life.

Writing is higher than walking, thinking
is higher than writing, deciding higher
than thinking, deciding "no" higher than

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 9

deciding **yes'' — at least the man who
passes from one of these activities to
another will usually say that each later
involves a greater element of inner U)ork
than the earlier ones, even though the
total heat given out, or the foot-pounds
expended by the organism, may be less.
Just how to conceive this inner work
physiologically is as yet impossible, but
psychologically we all know what the
word means. We need a particular spur
or effort to start us • upon inner work;
it tires us to sustain it; and when long
sustained, we know how easily we lapse.
When I speak of "energizing,'* and its rates
and levels and sources, I mean therefore
our inner as well as our outer work.

Let no one think, then, that our problem
of individual and national economy is solely
that of the maximum of pounds raisable
against gravity, the maximum of locomotion,
or of agitation of any sort, that human
beings can accomplish. That might signify
little more than hurrying and jumping about

10 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

in inco-ordinated ways; whereas inner work,
though it so often reinforces outer work,
quite as often means its arrest. To relax,
to say to ourselves (with the "new thought-
crs") "Peace! be stilll" is sometimes a
great achievement of inner work. When I
speak of human energizing in general, the
reader must therefore understand that sum-
total of activities, some outer and some
inner, some muscular, some emotional, some
moral, some spiritual, of whose waxing and
waning in himself he is at all times so well
aware. How to keep it at an aj^reciable
maximum? How pot to let the level lapse?
That is the great problem. But the work
of men and women is of innumerable kinds,
each kind being, as we say, carried on by a
particular faculty ;\ so the great problem
splits into two sub-problems, thus:

(I). What are the limits of human faculty
in various directions?

(2). By what diversity of means, in the
differing types of human beings, may the
faculties be stimulated to their best results? \

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 11

Read in one way, these two questions
sound both trivial and familiar: there is a
sense in which we have all asked them ever
since we were born. Yet as a methodical
programme of scientific inquiry, I doubt
whether they have ever been seriously taken
up. If answered fully* almost the whole of
mental science and of the science of conduct
would find a place under them. I propose,
in what follows, to press them on the reader's
attention in an informal way.

The first point to agree upon in this enter-\
prise is that as a rtde men habituatty use only \
a small part of the powers which they actually j
possess and which they might use under appro^ ,'
priate conditions. ^

Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon
of feeling more or less alive on diffierent days. :
Everyone knows on any given day that
there are energies slumbering in him which
the incitements of that day do not call forth, I
but which he might display if these were
greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud
weighed upon us, keeping us below our |

12 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

highest notch of clearness in discernment,
sureness in reasoning, or firmness in decid-
ing. G>mpared with what we ought to be,
we are only half awake. \ Our fires are
damped, our drafts are checked. We are
making use of only a small part of our pos-
fiible mental and physical resources. In
some persons this sense of being cut off from
their rightful resource is extreme!, and we
then get the formidable neurasthenic and
psychasthenic conditions, with Ufe grown
into one tissue of impossibilities, that so
many medical books describe.

Stating the thing broadly, the human
individual thus lives usually far within his
limits; he possesses powers of various sorts
which he habitually fails to use. \He ener-
gizes below his maximum, and he behaves
below his optimum. In elementary faculty,
in co-ordination, in power c^ inhibition and
control, in every conceivable way, his life
is contracted like the field of vision of an
hysteric subject — but with less excuse, for
the poor hysteric b diseased, while in the

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 13

rest of us it is only an inveterate hahit

— the habit of inferiority to our full self

— that b bad.

/Admit so much, then, and admit also
tnat the charge of being inferior to their
full self is far truer of some men than of i
others; then the practical question ensues:
to what do the better mm owe their escape?
andf in the fluctuations which all men feel iri
their own degree of energizing, to what are the
improoements due, when they occur? '

In general terms the answer is plain:
Elither some unusual stimulus fills them
with emotional excitement, or some unusual
idea of necessity induces them to make an
extra effort of will. \ Excitements, ideas, and
efforts, in a word, are what carry us over
the dam. }

In those ''hyperesthetic" conditions which
chronic invalidism so often brings in its train,
the dam has changed its normal place. The
slightest functional exercise gives a distress
which the patient yields to and stops. In
such cases of ''habit-neurosis" a new range

14 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

of power often comes in consequence of the
"bullying-treatment/' of efforts which the
doctor obliges the patient, much against his
will, to make. First comes the very extrem-
ity ci distress, then follows unexpected
relief. There seems no doubt that we are
each and all of us to some extent victims of
habiUneuTosis. We have to admit the wider
potential range and the habitually narrow
actual use. We live subject to arrest by
degrees ci fatigue which we have come only
from habit to obey. Most ci us may learn
to push the barrier farther off, and to live
in perfect comfort on much higher levels oi
power.

G>untry people and city people, as a class,
illustrate this difference. The rapid rate of
life, the number of decisions in an hour, the
many things to keep account of, in a busy
city man*8 or woman's life, seem monstrous
to a country brother. He doesn't see how
we live at all. A day in New York or Chicago
fills him with terror. The danger and nobe
make it appear like a permanent earthquake.

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 15

But sdde him there, and in a year or two he
will have caught the pulse-beat. He will
vibrate to the city's rhythms; and if he
only succeeds in his avocation, whatever
that may be, he will find a joy in all the
hurry and the tension, he will keep the pace
as well as any of us, and get as much out of
himself in any week as he ever did in ten
weeks in the country.

The stimuli of those who successfully re-
spond and undergo the transformation here,
are duty, the example of others, and crowd*
pressure and contagion. The transforma-
tion, moreover, is a chronic one: the new
level of energy becomes permanwt. I The
duties of new offices of trust are constantly
producing this effect on the human beings
ai^x>inted to them. \The physiologbts call
a stimulus ''dynamogenic'* when it in»
creases the muscular contractions ci men
to whom it is applied; but appeals can be
dynamogenic morally as well as muscularly.
We are witnessing here in America to<lay
the dynamogenic e£Fect of a very exalted

16 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

political office upon the energies of an
individual who had already manifested a j
healthy amount of energy before the office t
came.

Humbler examples show perhaps still
better what chronic effects duty's appeal f
may produce in chosen individuak. John
Stuart Mill somewhere says that women
excel men in the power of keeping up sus^
tained moral excitement. Every case of
illness nursed by wife or mother b a proof
of this; and where can one find greater
examples of sustained endurance than in
those thousands of poor homes, where the
woman successfully holds the family to*
gether and keeps it going by taking all the
thought and doing all the work — nursing,
teaching, cooking, washing, sewing, scrub-
bing, saving, helping neighbors, "choring"
outside — where does the catalogue end?
If she does a bit of scolding now and then
who can blame her? But often she does
just the reverse; keeping the children clean
and the man good tempered, and soothing

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 17

and smoothing the whole neighborhood into
finer shape.

Ejghty years ago a certain Montyon left
to the Academie Frangaise a sum of money
to be given in small prizes, to the best ex-
amples of "virtue" of the year. The
academy's committees, with great good
sense, have shown a partiality to virtues
simple and chronic, rather than to her
spasmodic and dramatic flights; and the
exemplary housewives reported on have
been wonderful and admirable enough.
In Paul Bourget's report for this year we
find numerous cases, of which this is a type;
Jeanne Chaix, eldest of six children; mother
insane, father chronically ill. Jeanne, with
no money but her wages at a pasteboard-
box factory, directs the household, brings
up the children, and successfully maintains
the family of eight, which thus subsists,
morally as well as materially, by the sole
force of her valiant will In some of these
French cases charity to outsiders iis added
to the inner family burden; or helpless

18 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

relatives, young or old, are adopted, as if
the strength were inexhaustible and ample
for every appeal Details are too long to
quote here; but human nature, respond-
ing to the call d duty, appears nowhere
sublimer than in the person of these
humble heroines 6i hndly life.

Turning from more chronic to acuter
proofs of human nature's reserves of power,
we find that the stimuli that carry us over
the usually e£Fective dam are most often
the classic emotional ones, love, anger,
crowd-contagion or despair. Despair lames
most people, but it wakes others fully up.
Every siege or shipwreck or polar expedition
brings out some hero who keeps the whole
company in heart Last year there was a
terrible colliery explosion at G>urri6res in
France. Two hundred corpses, if I remem-
ber rightly, were exhumed. After twenty
days of excavation, the rescuers heard a
voice. **Me void,** said the first man un-
earthed. He proved to be a collier named
Nemy, who had taken command of thirteen

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 19

others in the darkness, disciplined them
and cheered them, and brought them out
alive. Hardly any of them could see or
speak or walk when brought into the day.
Five days later, a different type of vital
endurance was unexpectedly unburied in the
person of one Berton who, isolated from any
but dead companions, had been able to
sleep away most of his time.

A new position of responsibility will
usually show a man to be a far stronger
creature than was supposed. Cromwell's
and Grant's careers are the stock examples
of how war will wake a man up. I owe to
Professor C. E. Norton, my colleague, the
permission to print part of a private letter
from Colonel Baird-Smith • written shortly
after the six weeks' siege of Delhi, in 1857,
for the victorious issue of which that excel-
lent officer was chiefly to be thanked. He
writes ais follows:^

''. • . My poor wife had some reason to
think that war and disease between them
had left very little of a husband to take

20 THE EMRGIES OF MEN

under nursing when she got him again. An
attack of camp-scurvy had filled my mouth
with sores, shaken every joint in my body,
and covered me all over with sores and
livid spots, so that I was marvellously
unlovely to look upon. A smart knock on
the ankle-joint from the splinter of a shell
that burst in my face, in itself a mere hagO"
telle of a wound, had been of necessity
neglected under the pressing and incessant
calls upon me, and had grown worse and
worse till the whole foot below the ankle
became a black mass and seemed to threaten
mortification. I insisted, however, on being
allowed to use it till the place was taken,
mortification or no; and though the pain
was sometimes horribIe,p carried my point
and kept up to the last. 'On the day afto:
the assault I had an unlucky fall on isome
bad ground, and it was an open question
for a day or two whether I hadn't broken
my arm at the elbow. Fortunately it
turned out to be only a severe sprain, but
I am still conscious of the wrench it gave me.

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 21

To crown the whole pleasant catalogue, I
was worn to a shadow by a constant diar-
rhcea, and consumed as much opium as
would have done credit to my father-in-law
[Thomas De Quincey], However, thank
God, I have a good share of Tapleyism in
me and come out strong under difficulties.
I think I may confidently say that no man
ever saw me out of heart, or ever heard one
croaking word from me even when our pros-
pects were gloomiest. We were sadly
scourged by the cholera, and it was almost
appalling to me to find that out of twenty-
seven officers present, I could only muster
fifteen for the operations of the attack.
However, it was done, and afteir it was done
came the collapse. Don't be horrified when
I tell you that for the whole of the actual
siege, and in truth for some little time be-
fore, I almost lived on brandy. Appetite
for food I had none, but I forced myself to
eat just sufficient to sustain life, and I had
an incessant craving for brandy as the
strongest stimulant I could get Strange to

22 THE EMKGIES OF MEN

say, I was quite unconscious of its affecting
me in the slightest degree. The excitement
qf the Work was so great that no lesser one
seemed to haoe any chance against it, and I
certainly neoer found my intellect clearer or
my nerves stronger in my life. It was only
my wretched body that was weak, and the
moment the real work was done by our
becoming complete masters of Delhi, I
broke down without delay and discovered
that if I wished to live I must continue no
longer the system that had kept me up until
the crisis was passed. With it passed away
as if in a moment all desire to stimulate, and
a perfect loathing of my late staff of life took
possession of me."

Such experiences show how profound is
the alteration in the manner in which, under
excitement, our organism will sometimes per-
form its physiological work. The processes
of repair become different when the reserves
have to be used, and for weeks and months
the deeper use may go on.

Morbid cases, here as elsewhere, lay the

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 23

normal machihery bare. In the first number
of Dr. Morton Prince's Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, Dr. Janet has discussed five
cases of morbid in^ulse, with an explana-
tion that is precious for my present point
of view. One is a girl who eats, eats, eats,
all day. Another walks, walks, walks, and
gets her food from an automobile that
escorts her. Another is a dipsomaniac. A
fourth pulls out her hair. A fifth wounds
her flesh and bums her skin. Hitherto such
freaks of impulse have received Greek
names (as bulimia, dromomania, etc.) and
been scientifically disposed of as *' episodic
syndromata of hereditary degeneration.''
But it turns out that Janet's cases are all
what he calls psychasthenics, or victims of
a chronic sense of weakness, torpor, lethargy,
fatigue, insufficiency, in^KDssibility, unreality,
and powerlessness of will; and that in each
and all of them the particular activity pur-
sued, deleterious though it be, has the tem-
porary result of raising the sense of vitality
and making the patient feel alive again.

24 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

These things reanimate: they would reani«
mate us, but it happens that in each patient
the particular freak-activity chosen is the
only thing that does reanimate; and therein
lies the morbid state/ The way to treat such
persons is to discover to them more usual
and useful ways of throwing their stores of
vital energy into gear. |

i Colonel Baird-Smith, needing to draw on
altogether extraordinary stores of energy,
found that brandy and opium were ways of
throwing them into gear.

Such cases are humanly typical. We are
all to some degree oppressed, unfree. We
don't come to our own. It is there, but we
don't get at it. The threshold must be made
to shift. Then many of us find that an ec-
centric activity — a "spree," say — relieves.

There b no doubt that to some men sprees
and excesses of almost any kind are medici-
nal, temporarily at any rate, in spite of
what the moralists and doctors say.

But when the normal tasks and stimula-
tions of life don't put a man's deeper levels

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 25

of energy on tap, and he requires distinctly
deleterious excitements, his constitution
verges on the abnormal. The normal opener
of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the
will. The difficulty is to use it, to make the
effort which the word volition implies. But
if we do make it (or if a god, though he were
only the god Chance, makes it through us)»
it will act dynamogenically on us for a
month. It is notorious that a single suo*
cessful effort of moral volition, such as say-
ing "no'' to some habitual temptation, or
performing some courageous act, will launch
a man on a higher level of energy for days
and weeks, will give him a new range of
power. " In the act of uncorking the whiskey
bottle which I had brought home to get
drunk upon,'' said a man to me, "I suddenly
found myself running out into the garden,
where I smashed it on the ground. I felt
80 happy and uplifted after this act, that for
two months I wasn't tempted to touch a
drop."
The emotions and excitements due to

26 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

usual situations are the usual inciters dF the
will. But these act discontinuously; and in
the intervals the shallower levels of life tend
to dose in and shut us o£F. Accordingly the
best practical knowers of the human soul
have invented the thing known as methodi-
cal ascetic discipline to keep the deeper levels
constantly in reach. Beginning with easy
tasks* passing to harder ones, and exercising
day by day, it is, I believe, admitted that
disciples of asceticism can reach very high
levels of freedom and power of will.

Ignatius Loyola's spiritual exercises must
have produced this result in innumerable
devotees. But the most venerable ascetic
system, and the one whose results have the
most voluminous experimental corroboration
is undoubtedly the Yoga system in Hindu-
stan. From time immemorial, by Hatha
Yoga, Raja Yoga, Karma Yoga, or whatever
code of practice it might be, Hindu aspirants
to perfection have trained themselves, month
in and out, for years. The result claimed,
and certainly in many cases accorded by

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 27

impartial judges, is strength of character!
personal power, imshakability of soul. In
an article in the Philosophical Reoiew^ from
which I am largely copying here, I have
quoted at great length the experience with
"Hatha Yoga" of a very gifted European
friend of mine who, by persistently carrying
out for several months its methods of fasting
from food and sleep, its exercises in breath-
ing and thought^oncentration, and its fan-
tastic posture-gynmastics, seems to have
succeeded in waking up deeper and deeper
levels of will and moral and intellectual
power in himself, and to have escaped from
a decidedly menacing brain-condition of the
** circular'* type, from which he had suffered
for years.

Judging by my friend's letters, of which
the last I have is written fourteen months
after the Yoga training began, there can be
no doubt of his relative regeneration. He
has undergone material trials with indiffer-

^ "The Energies of Men." Philosophical Reoitw, vol. zvi.
No. 1, January, 1907. [G. Note on p. 3.]

28 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

ence, travelled third-<Jass on Mediterranean
steamers, and fourth^Iass on African trains*
living with the poorest Arabs and sharing
their unaccustomed food, all with equanim-
ity. His devotion to certain interests has
been put to heavy strain* and nothing is
more remarkable to me than the changed
moral tone with which he reports the situa-
tion. A profound modification has unques-
tionably occurred in the running of his
mental machinery. The gearing has changed,
and his will is available otherwise than it
was.

My friend is a man of very peculiar tem-
perament. Few of us would have had the
will to start upon the Yoga training* which*
once started* seemed to conjure the further
will-power needed out of itsetf. And not all
of those who could launch themselves would
have reached the same results. The Hindus
themselves admit that in some men the
results may come without call or bell. My
friend writes to me: "You are quite right
in thinking that religious crises* love-crises*

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 29

indignation^rises may awaken in a very
short time powers similar to those reached
by years of patient Yoga-practice/*

Probably most medical men would treat
this individual's case as one of what it is
fashionable now to call by the name of "self-
suggestion," or "expectant attention" — as
if those phrases were explanatory, or meant
more than the fact that certain men can be
influenced, while others cannot be influenced,
by certain sorts ci ideas. This leads me to
say a word about ideas considered as
dynamogenic agents, or stimuli for un-
locking what would otherwise be unused
reservoirs of individual power.

One thing that ideas do is to contradict
other ideas and keep us from believing them.
An idea that thus negates a first idea may
itself in turn be negated by a third idea, and
the first idea may thus regain its natural
influence over our belief and determine our
behavior. Our philosophic and religious de-
velopment proceeds thus by credulities,
negations, and negating of negations.

30 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

But whether for arousing or for stopping
belief, ideas may fail to be efficacious, just
as a wire at one time alive with electricity,
may at another time be dead. Here our
insight into causes fails us, and we can only
note results in general terms. In general,
whether a given idea shall be a live idea
depends more on the person into whose mind
it is injected than on the idea itself. Which
is the suggestive idea for this person, and
which for that one? Mr. Fletcher's disciples
regenerate themselves by the idea (and the
fact) that they are chewing, and re<hewing,
and super-chewing their food. Dr. Dewey's
pupils regenerate themselves by going with-
out their breakfast — a fact, but also an
ascetic idea. Not everyone can use these
ideas with the same success.

But apart from such individually varying
susceptibilities, there are common lines along
which men simply as men tend to be in-
flammable by ideas. As certain objects nat-
urally awaken love, anger, or cupidity, so
certain ideas naturally awaken the energies

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 31

of loyalty, courage, endurance, or devotion.
When these ideas are effective in an indi-
vidual's life, their effect is often very great
indeed. They may transfigure it, unlocking
innumerable powers which, but for the idea,
would never have come into play. "Father-
land," "the Flag," "the Union," "Holy
Church," "the Monroe Doctrine," "Truth,"
"Science," "Liberty," Garibaldi's i^ase,
"Rome or Death," etc., are so many ex-
amples of energy-releasing ideas. The social
nature of such phrases is an essential factor
of their dynamic power. They are forces
of detent in situations in which no other
force produces equivalent effects, and each
is a force of detent only in a specific group
of men. N '

The memory that an oath or vow has
been made will nerve one to abstinences and
efforts otherwise impossible; witness the
"pledge" in the history of the temperance
movement. A mere promise to his sweet*
heart will clean up a youth's life all over —
at any rate for a time. For such effects an

32 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

educated susceptibility is required. The
idea of one's "honor/' for example, unlocks
energy only in those of us who have had the
education of a ''gentleman/' so called.

That delightful being. Prince Pueckler*
Muskau, writes to his wife from Ejigland
that he has invented ''a sort of artificial
resolution respecting things that are difficult
of performance. My device," he continues,
''is this: I gioetm/ word of honor most solemnly
to mysdf to do or to leave undone thb or
that I am of course extremely cautious in
the use of this expedient, but when once
the word is given, even though I afterwards
think I have been precipitate or mistaken,
I hold it to be perfectly irrevocable, whatever
inconveniences I foresee likely to result. If
I were capable of breaking my word after
such mature consideration, I should lose all
respect for myself, — and what man of
sense would not prefer death to such an
alternative? . . . When the mysterious for-
mula is pronounced, no alteration in my
own view, nothing short of physical impos-

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 33

sibilities, must, for the welfare of my spul,
alter my will. ... I find something very
satisfactory in the thought that man has
the power of framing such props and weapons
out of the most trivial materials, indeed out
of nothing, merely by the force of his will,
which thereby truly deserves the name of
omnipotent/' *

Conversions, whether they be political,
scientific philosophic, or religious, form
another way in which bound energies are
let loose. They unify us, and put a stop
to ancient mental interferences. The result
is freedom, and often a great enlargement of
power. A belief that thus settles upon an
individual always acts as a challenge to his
will. But, for the particular challenge to
operate, he must be the right challengee.
In religious conversions we have so fine an
adjustment that the idea may be in the
mind of the challengee for years before it
exerts effects; and why it should do so then

^ "Tour in England, Ireland, and France," Phikdelphiaa
1833. p. 435.

34 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

is ditea so far from obvious that the event
is taken for a miracle of grace, and not a
natural occurrence. Whatever it is, it may
be a highwater mark of energy, in which
"noes/' once impossible, are easy, and in
which a new range of "yeses" gains the
right of way. l

We are just now witnessing a very copious
unlocking of energies by ideas in the persons
of those converts to " New Thought," " Chris*-
tian Science," "Metaphysical Healing," or
other forms of spiritual philosophy, who are
so numerous among us to<lay. The ideas
here are healthy-minded and optimistic; and
it is quite 'obvious that a wave of religious
activity, analogous in some respects to the
spread of early Christianity, Buddhism, and
Mohammedanism, is passing over our Amer-
ican world. The common feature of these
optimistic faiths is that they all tend to the
suppression of what Mr. Horace Fletcher
calls "fearthought." Fearthought he defines
as the "self-suggestion of inferiority"; so
that one may say that these systems all

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 35

operate by the suggestion of power. And
the power, small or great, comes in various
shapes to the individual, — power, as he
will tell you, not to "mind" things that
used to vex him, power to concentrate his
mind, good cheer, good temper — in short,
to put it mildly, a firmer, more elastic moral
tone.

The most genuinely saintly person I have
ever known is a friend of mine now suffering
from cancer of the breast — I hope that she
may pardon my citing her here as an example
of what ideas can do. Her ideas have kq>t
her a practically well woman for months
after she should have given up and gone to
bed. They have aimulled all pain and weak-
ness and given her a cheerful active life,
unusually beneficent to others to whom she
has afforded help. Her doctors, acquiescing
in results they could not understand, have
had the good sense to let her go her own way.

How far the mind-cure movement is des-
tined to extend its influence, or what intel-
lectual modifications it may yet undergOt no

36 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

one can foretell. It is essentially a religious
movement, and to academically nurtured
minds its utterances are tasteless and often
grotesque enough. It also incurs the nat-
ural enmity of medical politicians, and of
the whole trades-union wing of that pro-
fession. But no unprejudiced observer can
fail to recognize its importance as a social
phenomenon to^iay, and the higher medical
minds are already trying to interpret it
foirly, and make its power available for their
own therapeutic ends.

Dr. Thomas Hyslop, of the great West
Riding Asylum in Ejigland, said last year to
the British Medical Association that the best
sleep-produdng agent which his practice had
revealed to him, was prayer. I say this, he
added (I am sorry here that I must quote
from memory), purely as a medical man.
The exercise of prayer, in those who habitu-
ally exert it, must be regarded by us doctors
as the most adequate and normal of all the
pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the
nerves.

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 37

But in few of us are functions not tied up
by the exercise of other functions. Relatively
few medical men and scientific men, I fancy,
can pray. Few can carry on any living
commerce with "God." Yet many erf us
are well aware of how much freer and abler
our lives would be, were such important
forms of energizing not sealed up by the
critical atmosphere in which we have been
reared. There are in everyone potential
forms of activity that actually are shunted
out from use. Part of the imperfect vitality
under which we labor can thus be easily
explained. One part of our mind dams up
— even damns lip! — the other parts.

Conscience makes cowards of us all-
Social conventions prevent us from telling
the truth after the fashion of the heroes and
heroines of Bernard Shaw, We all know
persons who are models of excellence, but
who belong to the extreme philistinie type
of mind. So deadly is their intellectual
respectability that we can t converse about
certain subjects at all, can t let our minds

38 THE ENERGIES OF MEN

play over them, can't even menticm them
in their presence. I have numbered among
my deadest friends persons thus inhibited
intellectually, with whom I would gladly
have been able to talk freely about certain
interests of mine, certain authors, say, as
Bernard Shaw, Chesterton, Edward Car-
penter, H. G. Wells, but it wouldn't do, it
made them too uncomfortable, they wouldn't
play, I had to be silent. An intellect thus
tied down by literality and decorum makes
on one the same sort of an impression that
an able-bodied man would who should
habituate himself to db his work with only
one of his fingers, locking up the rest of his
organism and leaving it unused.

I trust that by this time I have said
enough to convince the reader both of the
truth and of the importance of my thesis.
The two questions, first, that^ tb» po s sible
^ ^xtent of our powers : and, second, that of
the various avenues of approach to them,
the various keys for unlocking them in
diverse i^ldividuals, dominate the whole

THE ENERGIES OF MEN 39

problem of individual and national educa-
tion. We need a topography of the limits
of human power* similar to the chart which
oculists use of the field of human vision.
We need also a study of the various types of
human being with reference to the different
ways in which their energy-reserves may be
appealed to and set loose. Biographies and
individual experiences of every kind may be
drawn upon for evidence here.^

^ "This would be an absolutely concrete study . . . The
linuts of power must be limits that have been realized in actual
persons, and the various ways of unlocking the reserves of power
must have been ^emplified in individual lives. ... So here is
a program of concrete individual psychology. ... It is replete
with interesting facts, and points to practical issues superior in
importance to anything we know." From tik AddrtMS as origi'
nally itUured before Ae Phihsophical Auociaiion; see zvi, Phikh
iophkd Reeieuf, 1. 19.

THE GOSPEL OF
RELAXATION

THE GOSPEL OF
RELAXATION'

I WISH in the following hour to take cer-
tain .KJ[ch5lpj;icaI dpcbTOfiS.^^
their practical applicatiom to mentaL.
hygiene — tx> the hygiene of our American
life more particularly. Our people, espe-
cially in academic circles* are turning

^OWard^^ psy rJioIogy TiAWAtfiiw)^ Widl 'gfcat

^BSCtations; and» if psychology is to jus-
tify them, it must be by showing fruits in
the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.

The reader may possibly have heard of
a peculiar theory of the emotions, commonly
referred to in psychological literature as the
Lange- James theory. According to this
theory, our emotions are mainly due to those
organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a
reflex way by the stimulus of the exciting
object or situation. An emotion of fear, for
example, or surprise, is not a direct effect

^ From *' Talks to Teachers on Psydiobgy: and to Students
on Some of Life's Ideals," Henry Holt and Company, 1899.

43

44 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

of the object's presence on the mind, but an
effect of that still earlier effect* the bodily
commotion which the object suddenly ex^
cites; so that* were this bodily commotion
suppr^sed, we should not so much fed fear
as call the situation fearful; we should not
feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the
object was indebd astonishing. One enthusi-
ast has even gone so far as to say that when
we fed sorry it is because we weep, when
we feel afraid it is because we run away,
and not conversely. Some of you may per-
haps be acquainted with the paradoxical
formula. Now, whatever exaggeration may
possibly lurk in this account df our emotions
(and I doubt myself whether the exaggera-
tion be very great), it is certain that the
main core of it is true, and that the mere
giving way to tears, for example, or to the
outward expression of an anger-fit, will result
for the moment in making the inner grief or
anger more acutely felt. There is, accord-
ingly, no better known or more generally
useful precept in the moral training of youth.

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 45

or in one's personal 8elf-<liscipline» than that
which bids us pay primary attention to
what we do and express, and not to care too
much for what we feel. If we only check a
cowardly impulse iir time, for example, or
if we only dont strike the blow or rip out
with the complaining or insulting word that
we shall regret as long as we live, our feelings
themselves will presently be the calmer and
better, with no particular guidance from us
on their own account. Action seems to
follow feeling, but really action and feeling
go together; and by regulating the action,
which is under the more direct control ci
the will, we can indirectly regulate the feel-
ing, which is not.

Thus the soverdgn voluntary path to
cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulneiss
be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round
cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheer-
fulness were already there. If such conduct
does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing
else on that occasion can. So to feel brave,
act as if we were brave, uie all our will to

46 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

that end» and a courage-fit will very likely
replace the fit of fear. Again, in order to
feel kindly toward a person to whom we
have been inimical, the only way is more or
less deliberately to smile, to make sympa-
thetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to
say genial things. One hearty laug^ together
will bring enemies into a closer communion
of heart than hours spent on both sides in
inward wrestling with the mental demon of
uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad
feeling only pins our attention on it, and
keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas,
if we act as if from some better feeling, the'
old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an
Arab, and silently steals away.

The best manuals of religious devotion
accordingly reiterate the maxim that we
must let our feelings go, and pay no regard
to them whatever. In an admirable and
widely successful little book called ''The
Christian's Secret of a Happy Life,*' by
Mrs. Hannah Whithall Smith, I find this
lesson on almost every page. Ad faithfully.

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 47

and you really have faith, no mattar how
cold and even how dubious you may feeL
**It is your purpose God looks at," writes
Mrs* Smith, **not your feelings about that
purpose; and your purpose, or will, is ther^*
fore the only thing you need attend to. • • •
Let your emotions come or let them go, just
as God pleases, and make no account of
them either way. . . . They really have
nothing to do with the matter. They are
not the indicators of your spiritual state, but
are merely the indicators of your tempera-
ment or of your present phsrsical condition."
But you all know these facts already, so
I need no longer press them on your atten-
tion. From our acts and from our attitudes
ceaseless inpouring currents of sensation
come, which help to determine from moment
to moment what our inner states shall be:
that is a fundamental law of psychology
which I will therefore proceed to assume. ^

A Viennese neurologist of considerable y*^
reputation has recently written about the

48 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

Birmerdebetit as he tenns it, or buried life of
human beings. No doctor, this writer says,
can ge!t into really profitable relations with
a nervous patient until he gets some sense
of what the patient's Birmerdehen is, of the
sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which
his consciousness dweUs alone with the
secrets of its prison-house. This inner per«
sonal tone is what we can't communicate or
describe articulately to others; but the
wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often
what our friends and intimates feel as our
most characteristic quality. In the un-
healthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old
regrets, ambitions checked by shames and
aspirations obstructed by timidities, it con-
sists mainly of bodily discomforts not dis-
tinctly localized by the sufferer, but breed-
ing a general self-mistrust and sense that
things are not as they should be with him.
Half the thirst for alcohol that exists in the
world exists simply because alcohol acts as
a temporary anaesthetic and effacer to all
these morbid feelings that never ought to

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 49

be in a human being at alL In the healthy-
minded» on the contrary, there are no (ears
or shames to discover; and the sensations
that pour in from the organism only help
to swell the general vital sense of security
and readiness for anything that may turn
up.

Consider, for example, the effects of a
well-toned tnotor''apparatus» nervous and
muscular, on our general personal self-
consdousndss, the sense of elasticity and
efficiency that results. They tell us that in
Norway the life of the women has lately
been entirely revolutionized by the new
order of muscular feelings with which the use
of the ski* or long snow-shoes, as a sport for
both sexes, has made the women acquainted.
Fifteen years ago the Norwegian vwomen
were even more than the women of other
lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of
femininity, "the domestic angel," the '"gentle
and refining influence" sort of thing. Now
these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Nor-
way have been trained, they say, by the

50 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

snow-shoes into lithe and audacious crea^
tures, for whom no night is too dark or
height too giddy, and who are not only
saying good-bye to the traditional feminine
pallor and delicacy of constitution, but
actually taking the lead in every educational
and social reform. I cannot but think that
the tennis and tramping and skating habits
and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly
extending among our dear sisters and daug^
ters in this country are going also to lead to
a sounder and heartier moral tone, which
will send its tonic breath through all our
American life.

I hope that here in America more and
more the ideal of the well-trained and vigo-
rous body will be maintained neck by neck
with that of the well-trained and vigorous
mind as the two coequal halves of the higher
education for men and women alike. The
strength of the British Empire lies in the
strength of character of the individual Eng-
lishman, taken all alone by himself. And
that strengdi, I am persuaded, b perenmally

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 51

nourished and kept up by nothing so much
as by the national worship, in which all
classes meet, of athletic outdoor life and
sport.

I recollect, years ago, reading a certain
work by an American doctor on hygiene
and the laws of life and the type of future
humanity. I have forgotten its author's
name and its title, but I remember well an
awful prophecy that it contained about the
future of our muscular system. Human
perfection, the writer said, means ability to
cope with the environment; but the environ-
ment will more and more require mental
power from us, and less and less will ask for
bare brute strength. Wars will cease, ma-
chines will do all our heavy work, man will
become more and more a mere director of
nature's energies, and less and less an exerter
of energy on his own account. So that, if
the homo sapiens of the future can only digest
his food and think, what need will he have
of well^leveloped muscles at all? And vihy,
pursued this writer, should we not even now

52 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

be satisfied with a more delicate and intel-
lectual type of beauty than that which
pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard
a fanciful friend make a still further advance
in this "new-man" direction. With our
future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid
form from the chemical elements of the at-
mosphere, pepsinated or half-digested in
advance, and sucked up through a glass
tube from a tin can, what need shall we have
of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go,
along with our muscles and our physical
courage, while, challenging ever more and
more our proper admiration, will grow the
gigantic domes of our crania, arching over
our spectacled eyes, and animating our
flexible little lips to those floods of learned
and ingenious talk which will constitute our
most congenial occupation.

I am sure that your flesh creeps at this
apocalyptic vision// Mine certainly did so;
and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor
will ever be a superfluity* Even if the day
ever dawns in which it will not be needed

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 53

(or fighting the old heavy battles against
Nature, it will still always be needed to
furnish the background of sanity, serenity,
and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elastic-
ity to our disposition, to round off the wiry
edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-
humored and easy of approach. Weakness
is too apt to be what the doctors call irritable
weakness. And that blessed internal peace
and confidence, that acquiescentia in seipso,
as Spinoza used to call it, that wells up from
every part of the body of a muscularly well-
trained human being, and soaks the indwell-
ing soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite
apart from every consideration of its me-
chanical utility, an element of spiritual
hygiene of supreme significance.

And now let me go a step deeper into
mental hygiene, and try to enlist your in-
sight and sympathy in a cause which I
believe is one of paramount patriotic im-
portance to us Yankees. Many years ago
a Scottish medical man. Dr. Clouston, a
mad-doctor as they call him there, or what

54 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

we should call an asylum physician (the
most eminent one in Scotland), visited this
country, and said scnnething that has re-
mained in my memory ever since* ''You
Americans/' he said, ''wear too much ex-
pression on your faces/ You are living like
an army with all its reserves engaged in
action. The duller countenances of the
British population betoken a better scheme
of life. They suggest stores of reserved
nervous force to fall back upon, if any
occasion should arise that requires it. This
inexcitability, this presence at all times of
power not used, I regard,'* continued Dr.
Clouston, "as the great safeguard of our
British people. The other thing m you gives
me a sense of insecurity, and you ought
somehow to tone yourselves down. You
really do carry too much expression, you
take too intensely the trivial moments of
life."

Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of
the secrets of the soul as expressed upon the
countenance, and the observation of his

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 55

which I quote seems to me to mean a great
deal. And all Americans who stay in
Europe long enough to get accustomed to
the spirit that reigns and expresses itself
there, so unexcitable as compared with ours,
make a similar observation when they return
to their native shores. They find a wild-
eyed look upon their compatriots' (aces
either of too de^erate eagerness and anxiety
or of too intense responsiveness and good
will. It is hard to say whether the men or
the women show it most. It is true that we
do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt.
Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it.
We say: ''What intelligence it shows! How
di£Ferent from the stolid cheeks, the codfish
eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have
been seeing in the British Isles I" Intensity,
rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed
with us something of a nationally accepted
ideal; and the medical notion of ''irritable
weakness" is not the first thing suggested
by them to our mind, as it was to Dr, Clous-
ton s. In a weekly paper not very long ago

56 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

I remember reading a story In which, after
describing the beauty and interest of the
heroine's personality, the author summed
up her charms, by saying that to all who
looked upon her an impression as of ''bot-
tled lightning" was irresistibly conveyed.
Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our
American ideals, even of a young girl's
character! Now it is most ungracious, and
it may seem to some persons unpatriotic, to
criticise in public the physical peculiarities
of one's own people, of one's own family, so
to speak. Besides, it may be said, and said
with justice, that there are plenty of bot-
tled-lightning temperaments in other coun-
tries, and plenty of phlegmatic temperaments
here; and that, when all is said and done,
the more or less of tension about which I am
making such a fuss is a very small item in
the sum total of a nation's life, and not
worth solemn treatment at a tune when
agreeable rather than disagreeable things
should be talked about. Well, in one sense
the more or less of tension in our faces and

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 57

in our unused muscles is a small thing: not
much mechanical work is done by these
contractions. But it is not always the ma-
terial size of a thing that measures its im-
portance: often it is its place and function.
One of the most philosophical remarks I ever
heard made was by an unlettered workman
who was doing some repairs at my house
many years ago. "There is very little dif-
ference between one man and another/* he
said, ''when you go to the bottom of it.
But what little there b, is very important."
And the remark certainly applies to this case.
The general over-contraction may be small
when estimated in foot-pounds, but its
importance is immense on account of its
effects on the taer^orUracted persons spiritual
life. This follows as a necessary consequence
from the theory of our emotions to which I
made reference at the beginning of this
article. For by the sensations that so inces-
santly pour in from the overtense excited
body the overtense and excited habit of
mind is kept up; and the sultry, threaten-

58 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

ingi exhausting* thunderous inner atmos«
phere never quite clears away. If you never
wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit
in, but always keep your leg- and body-
muscles half contracted for a rise; if you
breathe eighteen or nineteen instead of six-
teen times a minute, and never quite breathe
out at that, — what mental mood can you
be in but one of inner panting and expeo
tancy, and how can the future and its worries
possibly forsake your mind? On the other
hand, how can they gain admission to your
mind if your brow be unruffled, your res-
piration calm and complete, and your
muscles all relaxed?

Now viiat is the cause of thb absence of
repose, this bottled-lightning quality in us
Americans? ^ The explanation of it that is
usually given is that it comes from the
extreme dryness of our climate and the
acrobatic perfomances of our thermometer,
coupled with the extraordinary progressive-
ness of our life, the hard work, the railroad
speed, the rapid success, and all the other

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION »

things we know so well by heart. Well, our.
climate is certainly exciting, but hardly
more so than that of many parts of Europe,
where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls
are found. And the work done and the pace
of life are as extreme in every great capital
of Europe as they are here. To me both of
these pretended causes are utterly insufficient
to explain the facts*

To explain them, we must go not to phys-
ical geography, but to psychology and
sociology. The latest chapter both in soci-
ology and in psychology to be developed in
a manner that approaches adequacy b the
chapter on the imitative impulse. First
Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Bald-
win here, have shown that invention and
imitation, taken together, form, one may
say, the entire warp and woof of human
life, in so far as it b social. The American
overtension and jerkiness and breathlessness
and intensity and agony of expression are
primarily social, and only secondarily physi-
ological, phenomena. They are lad habits^

60 TOE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

nothing more or less, bred of custom and
example, bom of the imitation of bad models
and the cultivation of false personal ideals.
How are idioms acquired, how do local
peculiarities of phrase and accent come
about? Through an accidental example set
by some one, which struck the ears of others,
and was quoted and copied till at last every
one in the locality chimed in. Just so it is
with national tricks of vocalization or in-
tonation, with national manners, fashions
of movement and gesture, and habitual
expressions of face. We, here in America,
through following a succession of pattern-
setters whom it is now impossible to trace,
and through influencing ^ch other in a bad
direction, have at last settled down collec-
tively into what, for better or worse, is our
own characteristic national type, — a type
with the production of which, so far as these
habits go, the climate and conditions have
had practically nothing at all to do.

This type, which we have thus reached
by our imitativeness, we now have fixed

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 61

upon us, for better or worse. Now no type
can be wholly disadvantageous; but, so far
as our type follows the bottled-lightning
fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr.
Clouston was certainly right in thinking
that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety
are not signs of strength: they are signs of
weakness and of bad co-ordination. The
even forehead, the slab^like cheek, the cod-
fish eye, may be less interesting for the
moment; but they are more promising signs
than intense expression is of what we may
expect of their possessor in the long run.
Your dull, unhurried worker gets over a
great deal of ground, because he never goes
backward or breaks down. Your intense,
convulsive worker breaks down and has bad
moods so often that you never know where
he may be when you most need his help,
— he may be having one of his "bad days/*
We say that so many of our fellow-country-
men collapse, and have to be sent abroad to
rest their nerves, because they work so hard
I suspect that this is an immense mistake.

62 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

I suspect that neither the nature nor the
amount of our work is accountable for the
frequency and severity of our breakdowns,
but that their cause lies rather in those
absurd feelings of hurry and having no
time, in that breathlessness and tension,
that anxiety of feature and that solicitude
for results, that lack of inner harmony and
ease, in short, by which with us the work is
so apt to be accompanied, and from which a
European who should do the same work
would nine times out of ten be free. These
perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of
inner attitude and outer manner in us,
cauj^t from the social atmosphere, kept up
by tradition, and idealized by many as the
admirable way of life, are the last straws
that break the American camels back, the
final overfbwers of our measure of wear
and tear and fatigue.

The voice, for example, in a surprisingly
large number of us, has a tired and plaintive
sound. Some of us are really tired (for I
do not mean absolutely to deny that our

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 63

climate has a tiring quality); but far more
of us are not tired at all, or would not be
tired at all unless we had got into a wretched
trick of feeling tired, by following the preva-*
lent habits of vocalization and expression.
And if talking high and tired, and living
excitedly and hurriedly, would only enable
us to do more by the way, even while break-
ing us down in the end, it would be different.
There would be some compensation, some
excuse, for going on so. But the exact reverse
is the case. It is your relaxed and easy
worker, who is in no hurry, and quite
thoughtless most of the while of conse-
quences, who b your efficient worker; and
tension and anxiety, and present and future,
all mixed up together in our mind at once,
are the surest drags upon steady progress
and hindrances to our success. My colleague.
Professor Munsterberg, an excellent observer,
who came here recently, has written some
notes on America to German papers. He
says in substance that the appearance of
unusual energy in America is superficial

64 HIE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

and illusory, being really due to nothing
but the habits of jerkiness and bad co-
ordination (or which we have to thank
the defective training of our people. I think
myself that it is high time for old legends
and traditional opinions to be changed;
and that, if anyone should begin to write
about Yankee inefficiency and feebleness,
and inability to do anything with time except
to waste it, he would have a very pretty
paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with
a great many facts to quote, and a great
deal of experience to appeal to in its proof.
Well, my friends, if our dear American
character is weakened by all this over-
tension, — and I think, whatever reserves
you may make, that you will agree as to
the main facts, — where does the remedy
lie? It lies, of course, where lay the origins
of the disease. If a vicious fashion and
taste are to blame for the thing, the
fashion and taste must be changed. And,
though it is no small thing to inoculate
seventy millions of people with new stand-

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 65

ards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that
will have to be done. We must change our-
selves from a race that admires jerk and
snap for their own sakes, and looks down
upon low voices and quiet ways as dull, to
one that, on the contrary, has calm for its
ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony,
dignity, and ease.

So we go back to the psychology of imita-
tion again. There is only one way to im-
prove ourselves, and that is by some of us
setting an example which the others may
pick up and imitate till the new fashion
spreads from east to west Some of us are
in more favorable positions than others to
set new fashions. Some are much more
striking personally and imitable, so to speak.
But no living person is sunk so low as not
to be imitated by somebody. Thackeray
somewhere says of the Irish nation that
there never was an Irishman so poor that
he didn't have a still poorer Irishman living
at his expense; and, surely, there is no
human being whose example doesn't work

66 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

contagiously in some particular. The very
idiots at our public institutions imitate
each other's peculiarities. And, if you
should individually achieve calmness and
harmony in your own person, you may
depend upon it that a wave of imitation
will spread from you, as surely as the
circles spread outward when a stone is
dropped into a lake.

Fortunately, we shall not have to be
absolute pioneers. Even now in New York
they have formed a society for the improve-
ment of our national vocalization, and one
perceives its machinations already in the
shape of various newspaper paragraphs in-
tended to stir up dissatisfaction with the
awful thing that it b. And, better still than
that, because more radical and general, is
the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it,
preached by Miss Annie Payson Call of
Boston, in her admirable little volume
called "Power through Repose," a book that
ought to be in the hands of every teacher
and student in America of either sex. You

TFE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 67

need only be followers, then, on a path
already opened up by others. But of one
thing be confident: others still will follow
you.

And this brings me to one more applica-
tion of psychology to practical life, to which
I will call attention briefly, and then close.
If one's example of easy and calm ways is
to be effectively contagious, one feels by
instinct that the less voluntarily one aims
at getting imitated, the more unconscious
one Beeps in the matter, the more likely
one is to succeed. Become the imitable thing,
and you may then discharge your minds of
all responsibility for the imitation. The laws
of social nature will take care of that result.
Now the psychological principle on which
this precept reposes is a law of very deep
and widespread importance in the conduct
of our lives, and at the same time a
law which we Americans most grievously
neglect. Stated technically, the law is this:
that strong feeling about ones seff tends to
arrest the free association of ones objective

68 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

ideas and motor processes. We get the
extreme example of this in the mental
disease called melancholia.

A melancholic patient is filled through
and through with intensely painful emotion
about himself. He is threatened, he is
guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he
is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a cramp
on these feelings of his own situation, and
in all the books on insanity you may read
that the usual varied flow of his thoughts
has ceased. His associative processes, to
use the technical phrase, are inhibited; and
his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their
one monotonous function of reiterating in-
wardly the fact of the man's desperate estate.
And this inhibitive influence is not due to
the mere fact that his emotion is painful.
Joyous emotions about the self also stop
the association ci our ideas. A saint in
ecstasy is as motionless and irresponsive
and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And,
without going as far as ecstatic saints, we
know how in everyone a great or sudden

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 69

pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought.
Ask young people returning from a party
or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what
it was. "Oh, it was find it was find it
was find*' is all the information you are
likely to receive until the excitement has
calmed down. Probably every cme of my
hearers has been made temporarily half
idiotic by some great success or piece of
good fortune. **Good\ goodI GOOdI'* is
all we can at such times say to ourselves
until we smile at our own very foolishness.
Now from all this we can draw an ex-
tremely practical conclusion. If, namely,
we wish our trains of ideation and volition
to be copious and varied and effective, we
must form the habit of freeing them from
the inhibitive influence of reflection upon
them, of egoistic preoccupation about their
results. Such a habit, like other habits,
can be formed. Prudence and duty and self-
regard, emotions of ambition and emotions
of anxiety, have, of course, a needful part
to play in our lives. But confine them as

70 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

far as possible to the occasions when you
are making your general resolutions and
deciding on your plans of campaign, and
keep them out of the details. When once a
decision is reached and execution is the
order of the day, dismiss absolutely all
responsibility and care about the outcome.
Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and
practical machinery, and let it run free;
and the service it will do you will be twice
as good. Who are the scholars who get
"rattled" in the redtation-rocon? Those who
think of the possibilities of failure and feel
the great importance of the act. Who are
those who do recite well? Often those who
are most indifferent. Their ideas reel them-
selves out of their memory of their own
accord. Why do we hear the complaint so
often that social life in New Ejigland is
either less rich and expressive or more
fatiguing than it is in some other parts of
the world? To what is the fact, if fact it
be, due unless to the overactive conscience
of the people, afraid of either saying some-

TOE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 71

thing too trivial and obvious, or something
insincere, or something unworthy of one*s
interlocutor, or something in some way or
other not adequate to the occasion? How
can conversation possibly steer itself through
such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions
as this? On the other hand, conversation
does flourish and society is refreshing, and
neither dull on the one hand nor exhausting
from its effort on the other, wherever people
forget their scruples and take the brakes
off their hearts, and let their tongues wag
as automatically and irresponsibly as they
wiU.

They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day
about the duty of the teacher to prepare
for every lesson in advance. To some extent
this is useful. But we Yankees are assuredly
not those to whom such a general doctrine
should be preached. We are only too careful
as it is. The advice I should give to most
teachers would be in the words of one who is
herself an admirable teacher. Prepare your-
self in the subject so well that it shall he always

72 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

an tap: then in the class-room trust your
spontaneity and fling away all further care.
My advice to students, especially to girl-
studentSt would be somewhat similar. Just
as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may
one's carefulness and conscientiousness be
so tense as to hinder the running di one's
mind. Take, for example, periods when
there are many successive days of examina*
tion impending. One ounce of good nervous
tone in an examination is worth many
pounds di anxious study for it in advance.
If you want really to do your best in an
examination, fling away the book, the day
before, say to yourself, *'I wont waste
another minute on this miserable thing, and
I don't care an iota whether I succeed or
not/' Say this sincerely, and feel it, and
go out and i^ay, or go to bed and sleep, and
I am sure the results next day will encourage
you to use the method permanently. I have
heard thb advice given to a student by Miss
Gill, whose book on muscular relaxation I
quoted a moment ago. In her later book.

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 73

entitled ''As a Matter of G)urset" the gospel
of moral relaxation* of dropping things from
the mind, and not ''caring/' is preached with
equal success. Not only our preachers, but
our friends the theosophists and mind-curers
of various religious sects are also harping on
this string. And with the doctors, the
Delsarteans, the various mind-curing sects,
and such writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice
Mulford, Mr. Horace Fletcher, and Mr.
Trine to help, and the whole band oi school-
teachers and magazine-readers chiming in,
it really looks as if a good start might be
made in the direction of changing our Amer-
ican mental habit into something more
indifferent and strong.

Worry means always and invariably m-
hibition of associations and loss of effective
power. Of course, the sovereign cure for
worry is religious faith; and this, of course,
you also know. The turbulent billows of
the fretful surface leave the deep parts of
the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has
a hold. on vaster and more permanent

74 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

realities the hourly vicissitudes of his per-
sonal destiny seem relatively insignificant
things. The really religious person is accord-
ingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and
calmly ready for any duty that the day may
bring forth. Thb is charmingly illustrated
by a little work with which I recently be-
came acquainted, ''The Practice of the
Presence of God, the Best Ruler of a Holy
Life, by Brother Lawrence, being G)nversa-
tions and Letters of Nicholas Herman of
Lorraine, Translated from the French.*'^
I extract a few passages, the conversations
being given in indirect discourse. Brother
Lawrence was a Gmmelite friar, converted
at Paris in 1666. ''He said that he had been
footman to M. Fieubert, the Treasurer, and
that he was a great awkward fellow, who
broke everything. That he had desired to
be received into a monastery, thinking that
he would there be made to smart for his
awkwardness and the faults he should com-
mit, and so he should sacrifice to God his

^ Fleming H. Reveil Company, New York.

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 75

-; - . - - • -•

life, with its pleasures; but that God had
disappointed him, he having met with
nothing but satisfaction in that state. • . •

"That he had long been troubled in mind
from a certain belief that he should be
damned; that all the men in the world could
not have i>ersuaded him to the contrary; but
that he had thus reasoned with himself about
it: / engaged in a religious life only for the
love of God, and I haoe endeojoored to act only
for Him; tohaleoer becomes of me, whether I be
lost or saoed, I will always continue to act
purely for the love of God. I shall haoe this
good at least, that till death I shall have done
att that is in me to love Him* . • . That since
then he had passed his life in perfect liberty
and continual joy.

"That when an occasion of practising
some virtue offered, he addressed himself
to God, saying, 'Lord, I cannot do this unless
Thou enablest me' ; and that then he received
strength more than sufficient. That, when
he had failed in his duty, he only confessed
his fault, saying to God, 'I shall never do

76 THE CWSPEL OF RELAXATION

otherwise, if You leave me to myself; it is
You who must hinder my failing, and mend
what is amiss/ That after this he gave
himself no further uneasiness about it.

*'That he had been lately sent into Bur-
gundy to buy the provision of wine for the
society, which was a very unwelcome task
for him, because he had no turn for business,
and because he was lame, and could not go
about the boat but by rolling himself over
the casks. That, however, he gave himself
no uneasiness about it, nor about the pur-
chase of the wine. That he said to God,
' It was His business he was about,' and that
he afterward found it well performed. That
he had been sent into Auvergne, the year
before, upon the same account; that he
could not tell how the matter passed, but
that it proved very well.

''So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen
(to which he had naturally a great aversion),
having accustomed himself to do everything
there for the love of God, and with prayer
upon all occasions, for His grace to do his

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 77

work well, he had found everything easy
during fifteen years that he had been em*
ployed there.

''That he was very well pleased widi the
post he was now in» but that he was as ready
to quit that as the former* since he was
always pleasing himself in every condition,
by doing little things for the love of God.

*'That the goodness of God assured him
He would not forsake him utterly, and that
He would give him strength to bear whatever
evil He permitted to happen to him; and,
therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no
occasion to consult with anybody about his
state. That, when he had attempted to
do it, he had always come away more
perplexed.*'

The simple-heartedness of the good
Brother Lawrence, and the relaxation of
all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties
in him, is a refreshing spectacle. '

The need of feeling responsible all the
livelong day has been preached long enough

78 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

in our New Ejigland. Long enough exclu-*
sively, at any rate, — and long enough to
the female sex. What our girl-students and
woman-teachers most need nowadays is not
the exacerbation, but rather the toning-
down of their moral tensions. Even now I
fear that some one of my fair hearers may
be making an undying resolve to become
strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for
the remainder of her life. It is needless to
say that that is not the way to do it. The
way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem,
b genuinely not to care whether you are
doing it or not. Then possibly, by the grace
of God, you may all at once find that you
are doing it, and, having learned what the
trick feels like, you may (again by the grace
of God) be enabled to go on.

And that something like this may be the
happy experience of all my hearers is, in
closing, my most earnest wish. ^

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